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Pleasing Giver and, at Times, Recipient, Too

"PostSecret" is a book made from an art project that wound up on a Web site that was started by Frank Warren. It began when Mr. Warren began inviting strangers to express their innermost thoughts on postcards and then put those postcards in the mail.

Mr. Warren has now assembled these drawings and confessions -- what he calls "graphic haiku" -- into a volume about hating bosses, lying about sex, feeling pariahlike and behaving weirdly without getting caught. No subject is too trivial to warrant a secret confession.

So here's one thought that didn't make "PostSecret": Gimmicky books make awful gifts.

Why? Because they're so much easier to give than they are to receive. They're so much more gratifying to gift givers than they are to recipients. And the act of follow-through is not often a big part of these transactions. A gift book may be chosen on impulse, but it can confound whoever winds up with it for a long, long time. Here's a selection of this year's offerings, and a guide to which make good company -- and which do not.

Consider "The Complete New Yorker." This would be a gift straight out of an O. Henry story if O. Henry had had a computer. As its title suggests, this booklike package fits more than 4,000 issues of The New Yorker onto eight computer disks. And not only articles, poems and cartoons: there is the occasional ad for a bird print or a culturally interesting vacation spot too.

It looks easy to use -- until you start using it. Then things get tricky. If your computer prowess allows you to look up Mr. Warren's Web site, for instance, but not to install New Yorker software and then move easily from "Read Mode" to "Flip Mode" (two options here), difficulties loom. Instructions for this package make it look tantalizingly simple, but it's not. And the content of 4,000 New Yorker issues requires quite a bit of elbow room on your computer. On the other hand, the New Yorker franchise has yielded many wonderful anthologies that can simply be picked up and read. And they're on paper.

If the computerized New Yorker winds up sitting unused, the latest edition of "The Timetables of History" achieves the opposite effect. Here, in phone-book-size paperback, is a book that can be opened at random and used to link developments in science, culture, religion, philosophy, history and daily life -- with a cross section arranged by time, beginning in 4500 B.C. The early centuries are understandably sketchy; in music, the only interesting development in the A.D. 735-745 period was the establishment of a singing school at the Monastery of Fulda. But the timetables get busier as the years go by. This book isn't showy, but its skimming value is remarkable. How else would you know that Davy Crockett and Betsy Ross died in the same year? (1836.)

Among historical surveys that are literate rather than list-filled, "Creating Black Americans" is a successful hybrid of art and narrative, arranged chronologically and invitingly. "Women's Letters" traces the evolution of American life from the Revolutionary War through the present, with voices most compelling for their candor.

An even more sweeping world view is handsomely (if heavily) packaged in the Deluxe Edition of Oxford's Atlas of the World. Here again, there is real utility: the world changes constantly, and this volume offers more than mere maps (although its maps are beautifully clear). There is information about climate, vegetation, globalization, standards of living and so on, as well as the expected odd superlatives: here is the place to affirm that the 18,510-foot Elbrus, in Russia, is the highest mountain in Europe. This atlas wisely varies the scales of different maps to correspond with varying population density and other considerations.

Should you want to do more about distant places than simply look at them, "Hip Hotels Atlas" offers another form of vicarious travel. Hipness is clearly in the eye of the beholder, but there are some common factors in the choices here: water nearby, exotic furniture, not the Holiday Inn. It is a busy, peripatetic picture book that does not linger in individual locations but certainly captures the spirit of travel.

For a closer and more colorful look at a distant setting of great, mysterious beauty, "India" provides a revealing, vibrant panorama. And surely the unlikeliest travel book of the season is "Untrodden Grapes," a volume of illustrations by Ralph Steadman, a book that is pure oxymoron. Mr. Steadman's famously anarchic style of drawing is brought to bear upon a global selection of vineyards. Mr. Steadman is on the trail of gonzo wine.

The fusion of culture and travel is often a fertile picture-book formula. Certainly it makes a rewarding combination in William Claxton's "Jazz Life," a book as impressive as it is backbreaking. This is a large-format reissuing of photographs taken in 1960, when Mr. Claxton and the German musicologist Joachim E. Berendt embarked on a road trip in America. They found and photographed the great jazz artists of that time, with a particularly jubilant, evocative emphasis on vintage New Orleans spirit. If this book seems to warrant musical accompaniment, its 700-page package includes a CD soundtrack. It's a CD that is eminently usable, too.

A kitschy and much smaller American scrapbook, Stephen Shore's "American Surfaces," has an outlook as patronizing as that of "Jazz Life" is affectionate. Mr. Shore goes in search of gas stations and motels, small-town storefronts, gruesome wallpaper, greasy food and disposable collectibles. The pictures were taken in the 1970's, and that era is certainly commemorated. Mr. Shore was a regular visitor at Andy Warhol's Factory, and the influence is unmistakable.

There's kitsch of a different kind in "Hollywood at Home," an Architectural Digest testament to staged movie-star domesticity. Here is Marilyn Monroe, conspicuously close to copies of "War and Peace" and "The Idiot"; here is Jayne Mansfield, in a bathroom with a gold heart-shaped tub and pink shag carpet on the ceiling. The book's true subject is artifice, and the cumulative effect of its domestic visions is greater than any individual one of them.

For more thoughtful insights into the world of film, the actor Matthew Modine proves to be a surprisingly acute observer. The visual and written memories presented in "Full Metal Jacket Diary" offer an unexpected glimpse of Stanley Kubrick's "Wizard of Oz" side and capture the harrowing atmosphere in which his Vietnam film took shape. At a different level of craftsmanship, the do-it-yourself primer "ReadyMade" is for anyone who found "PostSecret" too serious. Here's a guide to projects like making a rug out of old shopping bags.

There is a lot more glamour to be found in both "Woman in the Mirror," an elegant and arresting collection of Richard Avedon's photographs (with an emphasis on fashion) and "Eric Boman's Dames," a more colorful and cheerfully vulgar book in which Ivana Trump is the embodiment of pizzazz. But the season's most sophisticated and alluring images of women can be found in "Doisneau/Paris," an enchanting cross section of Parisian life by one of the photographers who best captured its many charms.

Now for the foolproof: creatures. It would take a heart of stone to resist "Marley and Me," a book with a puppy on its cover and a multihanky, very funny story by John Grogan of one Labrador retriever's eventful life. And "Vanishing Act," a nature photography book with staying power, studies the wide range of camouflage effects to be found in the animal kingdom. By far the most remarkable nature book this year is "Archipelago," a spectacular photo essay on the northwestern Hawaiian Islands and the wide variety of species to be found there.

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Finally, a favorite species: the rock 'n' roll dinosaur. This was a boom year for nostalgia -- baby-boom nostalgia, to be precise. And if the flashback-of-choice last year was Bob Dylan's memoir, the field has by now expanded to include even more giants of the day. It's tough to choose the most apt and haunting of these recollections. But consider the Baby Boom trifecta: the ingenious "Bob Dylan Scrapbook," Bob Spitz' historical overview in "The Beatles" and the unexpectedly compelling "Autobiography of Donovan" -- as a way of bringing it all back home.

Weighing Choices (Yes, Literally) The books referred to in this Critic's Notebook article: